Firefox 2.0 is out to play. IE7 is out to play. Who are we going to play with?
By now, you all know the fact that in the browser war the two main candidates have updated their weapons in a short time and that we can now evaluate their work. Both Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft have brought their IE in an attempt to convince Web users to use them more often while surfing.

The stake? A lot of cash from adjacent software made compatible with the browsers and a bigger market share. Both related, of course.

Since Microsoft is the target of this article I’m going to start with its product. I’m sure a lot of you interested readers out there have had the occasion of using it until now and also acquired information about what’s new in IE 7, so I’m not going to repeat all the stuff that has been said about it. But a few new features are worth remembering since two comparisons are necessary: IE7 vs. IE6 and IE7 vs. Mozilla’s FireFox.

The first thing that struck me after installing IE7 was of course the new, shiny, Vista-like interface. A major improvement compared to the dull and unimpressive UI of IE6. But I couldn’t find many of the buttons one usually finds in a browser (including IE6) like the bookmarks button for example. I could actually say that any improvement I saw in IE7 was a bit exaggerated in my mind because I had so many expectations from MS’s product.

Disaster!.. after a few moments of Web surfing with it and after so many years of intense FireFox the subjective positive exaggeration turned into subjective despair. I felt like I was using IE’s ancestor, Mozaic… No FoxyTunes, no personalized themes, no usual buttons, just a bare and shiny…thing that accessed Web pages and sometimes warned me about a phishing filter. No personalized experience of the Internet using (ironic, isn’t it?) Internet Explorer 7, that’s for sure.

I won’t make here though a reminder of all my negative experiences with IE7. It’s enough to say that I installed it and after a few hours I dumped it probably until IE8. I supposed by doing that I joined the club of other FF users who tried their best to understand what did MS think at when they created IE7…

Anyway, the subject of this article is to demonstrate why MS and IE have already lost the battle for supremacy, although they still hold to it tight.

I should begin my demonstration by paradoxically thanking IE and MS. It is IE’s flaws, bugs, exploits and lack of attractiveness that have triggered the revolution called FireFox. So thank you Microsoft for giving us FireFox!

I think the primordial purpose of a browser in modern times is to offer Web users the capacity to benefit from the richness available onthe internet , in a comfortable, secure and fast manner. It should also facilitate users’ contribution to the richness I was talking about in the same way. This is one chapter IE7 lost the battle.

It’s all about freedom. Internet is by definition a place where expression is unbridled. This is what the founding fathers of Mozilla have craved for in the era when IE was the hegemonic king. But expression is not only translated into the words we put in our blogs, or the photos we upload, or the videos we make available for comment. It also manifested into those tiny little programs that are the interface between us and the Web, called browsers. I can’t believe MS has not learned this lesson yet.

By comparison, FF lets you do (almost) whatever you want with it: there is no WGA, it’s available on every platform (Mac, Windows or Linux), the source code is available for all users, it comes with a lot of personalization options (add-ons, themes, plug-ins) and has a richness that IE will probably never have. Unfortunately…

All in all, Mozilla’s FireFox managed to be a flagship for what we now call Web 2.0. It created a community and I have seldom heard someone being unhappy inside that community. Although it started like a rebellion against the dominance of IE, the FireFox community is now made of people simply satisfied with a product they use every day in the most pleasant way possible. And that is not a sweet praise to FF and a condemnation of IE. It’s a reality recognized and accepted by all those involved. By the way, I haven’t yet heard of a community of “IE users”, although they are many…

Going deeper with the analysis, I have two remarks to make: one of them refers to the fact that MS is again forced be a copycat. And the second refers to the fact that IE7’s early apparition is tightly linked to the pressure generated by FireFox.

A copycat, yes. Just like in other cases, Microsoft is now forced to make IE integrate what FireFox brought to life: tabbed browsing. Might be a small contribution to the Web-surfing experience, but hell…it made my life a lot easier these years. No more “open in new window” sh*t, and no more memory overloading. What amazed me, confused me and eventually angered me is why MS did not implement this small feature all these years into IE6? It’s not like FF came out yesterday… But anyway, the good thing is that because of their laziness/stupidity/carelessness/whatever, they lost important market share in favor of FF and it’s now their turn to try to catch up. Competition is always good.

Now I see IE7 has some add-ons available (http://www.ieaddons.com/default.aspx?cid=home&scid=0). It’s a start. But hell, when I opened the page, my IE7 suddenly went down and began to move with a snail’s pace. Tipical: with the same number of tabs opened (3), IE7 was “eating” 80 MB of my system RAM, while FF ate only 58… But that’s not the core problem. It’s the fact that while for Mozilla all the add-ons, themes, etc. are user-generated and free for everyone not only to download but also to improve, in IE’s case all the add-ons are …corporate. And you cannot install them unless WGA is passed… Sorry MS, that just doesn’t seem to be very successful.

And since I mentioned user generated content and Web 2.0, another comparison comes to my mind: while for FF users “play” for users, for IE it’s MS who “plays”. And we all know what “positive” image MS has… I am aware of the controversy that surrounds the Web 2.0 hype, but if we were to consider the latter as being mainly centered on rich content, free communication between computers and user’s involvement, than FireFox is clearly the winner.

All these years I’ve been using FF have all been rewarding because you just cannot get bored. One of the main complaints many users have had about IE (mainly IE6) is that it was dull. Other browsers have speculated that and Opera for example offers lots of widgets to add to your Web-surfing, just to let you explore other dimensions and spare you some time. Now why did MS ignore this until now? Don’t tell me they haven’t seen the statistics about IE6…

I really don’t know how the Vista+IE7 combination is going to change the overall perception most of the Internet users have about MS’s browser. I predict a slight improvement in the three or four months after Vista’s debut. After that, FireFox will surge again into IE’s market, just as it did by now. The lack of support from users and restrictions applied through anti-piracy programs (considered normal in the case of a private firm) will make MS lose one more battle.

All in all, IE evolution is not impressive at all. It will still have one advantage though: after installing/reinstalling XP or Vista, IE7 will be the first and only browser used to download Opera, BonEcho or FireFox… And that will definitely keep statistics alive ;)…